Hands-on careers plentiful

Farshid Bastamian works under an automobile in the Diesel Motor Maintenance class at Amarillo College Transportation Career Center. Visit amarillo.com or scan the QR code for more photos from the school's automotive program.

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Amarillo’s unemployment rate continued to hover around 4 percent in December, and experts said nursing will continue to be the bright spot in the jobs market locally and nationally.

But there are opportunities here for other workers as well.

“There’s definitely a demand for workers in oil and gas, truck driving and nursing,” said Mollie Barney, business services coordinator for Workforce Solutions.

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers show about 5,700 people were unemployed in the Amarillo Metropolitan Statistical Area in December, the latest report issued by the department. The civilian labor force was 137,100 in that area, which includes Potter, Randall, Armstrong and Carson counties.

The bureau count is of people unemployed and looking for full-time employment. Others not counted might be working part time and looking for full-time jobs or people who have quit looking for work.

While local employment has been fairly stable, the region will have to get over a bump caused by at least 300 people in the Texas Panhandle being laid off by Cargill. They worked in the company’s beef packing plant in Plainview, commuting from Amarillo or living in smaller towns also served by the Amarillo Workforce office, like Kress and Tulia. The rest of the 2,000 laid off workers will be helped by the Workforce office in Lubbock.

“We have people from Cargill with skill sets all over the board from the slaughter floor to upper management,” Barney said. “There’s also a language barrier with some — Somali, Swahili, Farsi — Spanish we can translate. They were commuting from Amarillo.”

There are a variety of job training programs in the area preparing students for careers ranging from truck drivers and diesel mechanics to aerospace manufacturing and nursing — especially health care fields.

More than 3,000 students are studying some form of health care at Amarillo College and West Texas A&M University combined. The majors range from certified nurse assistant to physical therapy, and respiratory care to registered nurses and master degree nursing.

At Texas Tech University School of Medicine, there are 489 students at various stages of learning, said spokesman Mark Hendricks.

The School of Pharmacy has 252 students, the School of Medicine has 191 and the School of Allied Health has 46 doctors of physical therapy.

Amarillo College has 21 options for people wanting to go into health care. Some studies can result in certificates and some in associate degrees for the approximately 2,500 health students.

“We have students of all ages from their 20s to their 50s,” said Mark Rowh, AC’s dean of health sciences. “Community colleges tend to have people returning to college after having a career, an we’ve been experiencing an influx from people changing careers due to the downturn.”

Looking to the future, the school will host an event April 30 to highlight career opportunities for men in fields typically dominated by females such as nursing, surgical technicians, dental hygiene and assisting and medical labs, Rowh said.

The average nursing student at WT also is not fresh out of high school.

“Our average age is around 26,” said Helen Reyes, head of the nursing department. “We’re getting more broad in terms of gender and race and ethnicity.”

And there’s plenty of demand for the students.

“Our students have a 100 percent employment rate,” Reyes said. “We have a first-time passing rate of over 95 percent on licensing exams and a 100 percent passing rate in one year.”

The program has more than 500 students from the undergraduate to the graduate level.

“We’d have more if we had more faculty,” Reyes said. “Because there’s such a need for more masters-prepared (nurses), we just got permission to have our comprehensive master’s program online.”

“The majority of our students are males, but we’re trying to do some things to target females,” said Lyndy Wilkinson, dean of technical education. “The average age is late 20s to early 30s. They’re employed and either training for the job they’re in or retraining for different, higher-paying jobs.”

Some of the hottest demand for technical students is for truck drivers and diesel mechanics, but also for machining and instrumentation. The school also does specialty training for companies.